Other Immigrants

The Global Origins of the American People

David Reimers

Publication Year: 2005

Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians represent three of every four immigrants who arrived in the United States after 1970. Yet despite their large numbers and long history of movement to America, non-Europeans are conspicuously absent from many books about immigration.

In Other Immigrants, David M. Reimers offers the first comprehensive account of non-European immigration, chronicling the compelling and diverse stories of frequently overlooked Americans. Reimers traces the early history of Black, Hispanic, and Asian immigrants from the fifteenth century through World War II, when racial hostility led to the virtual exclusion of Asians and aggression towards Blacks and Hispanics. He then tells the story of post-1945 immigration, when these groups dominated the immigration statistics and began to reshape American society.

The capstone to a lifetime of groundbreaking work on immigration, Reimers’s thoughtful history recognizes the ambiguity and subjectivity of race, noting that individuals often define themselves more complexly than census forms allow. However classified, record numbers of immigrants are streaming to the United States and creating the most diverse society in the world. Other Immigrants is a timely account of their arrival.

Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

A good deal of my prior research and writing has focused on
immigrants other than Europeans, migrants some scholars label “people
of color.” These immigrants include Latinos, Asians, and blacks. I pulled
together some of my thoughts on these millions of persons for an essay
published by the American Historical Association’s Teaching Diversity...

Introduction

Thirty-five years ago this book, which is a history of the first
generation of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics coming to America, could
not have been written. The essential scholarship was uneven, and in many
cases historians and other scholars had no knowledge of particular immigrant
and ethnic groups. The history of African Americans...

Part I: From beyond Europe, 1492– 1940

After 1492 the French, Spanish, and English were the major
explorers of America, but the Dutch West India Company was also active.
Once the colonies became established, Europeans, especially those
from the British Isles, were most influential. Europeans had the greatest
numbers, and they had the power to control the largest group...

1. The Beginnings, 1550–1900

European men and women were not the only people exploring
and settling in what is now the United States. Although Africans did
not send ships to the Western Hemisphere, they worked on European vessels,
sometimes in positions of authority; it was not unheard of for persons
of one nationality or ethnicity to captain ships of...

2. Asians in Hawaii and the United States

While Chinese workers in Hawaii and merchants and students
on the mainland related their experiences back home, it was the discovery
of gold in California that prompted thousands to leave for America.
In 1849 only 345 Chinese “forty-niners” arrived; 450 more joined them
the next year, and then came a rapid increase: 20,026 landed...

3. North to America, 1900–1940

The census of 1870 counted approximately 10,000 foreign-born
blacks. Nearly a third were from Canada, no doubt the descendants
of those taken there after the American Revolution and those whose slave
ancestors had fled to Canada before the Civil War. After that date, black
migration to America resumed, although, of course, none...

Part II: The Emergence of a New Multicultural Society, 1940– Present

Since the end of World War II, and especially after 1965, a
surge of new immigrants has been altering America’s demography. When
the United States entered World War II, the conditions changed for some
Asians, Latinos, and blacks, though not necessarily for the better. Japanese
Americans on the West Coast were interned by the...

4. El Norte: Mexicans, 1940–Present

Of the latest newcomers from Asia, the Caribbean, and Central
and South America, Latinos constitute about half. And, among the
countries sending Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United States,
none have been so important as Mexico. Mexicans account for approximately
60 percent of the nation’s Hispanics, and amount to...

5. Central and South Americans

Although Mexican immigrants have accounted for more than
60 percent of the Latinos who arrived in the United States in the past half
century, substantial numbers of Central and South Americans, who established
communities in the United States before 1950, have also swelled
immigration totals. According to the 2000 census, Latinos, whose...

6. Across the Pacific Again: East Asian Immigrants

During World War II, many Americans began to change their
views about Asians. Chinese Americans especially found new economic
opportunities, and their participation in the military was welcomed. As
K. Scott Wong observed, “Whether or not World War II should be considered
the major watershed in twentieth-century American...

7. Across the Pacific Again: South Asian Immigrants

The renewed non-European immigration also included South
Asians, who had come in small numbers before World War II. The Asian
Indian migration flow began with legislation in 1946 that permitted the
entry of 100 Indian immigrants yearly and granted them the right to naturalization.
Two decades later the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 gave India...

8. Middle Easterners

Few Middle Easterners came to the United States before the
1880s. When they did, the immigrants traveled from ports in the Mediterranean
Sea on the journey to America. Mainly from the Ottoman Empire,
they consisted of a variety of groups and cultures, just as Asians and European
immigrants differed. Among them were Chaldeans...

9. The New Black Immigrants

Since the end of the World War II, more black immigrants have
entered the United States than during the slave era, when 450,000 black
slaves were forced to migrate from their homes to America. Of course
slaves were hardly immigrants with legal rights; neither did they arrive of
their own volition. For eighty years after the Civil War, free blacks...

10. The Refugees: Cubans and Asians

During the 1930s and World War II, few refugees seeking a
haven in the United States were able to settle in America. After World War
II, with America’s emergence as a superpower and the influence of the
cold war, immigration and refugee policy shifted, and the United States
admitted several million persons as refugees or displaced...

Epilogue

The surge of immigration of “people of color” in the last three
decades can scarcely be missed. The majority of immigrants have settled
in six states (California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Florida, and Illinois)
and in large metropolitan areas such as New York City, Washington,
D.C., Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston. But they have...

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